Northrop Grumman scored another win this last year after its Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node (TERN) concept was tapped for full-scale demonstration. The DARPA and Office of Naval Research-led program seeks to give Navy surface combatants, like destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships, fixed-wing aircraft…

Global Hawk is one of those drones so monumental and confounding that it becomes a perfect target for our cynical tendency to search for negatives, to decry the high cost and delight in mechanical flaws—as if any war machine could be perfect.

Less than half a year after being greenlit, the US Navy's newest broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) platform, the MQ-4C Triton, has just passed a major developmental milestone—as well as the whole of the contiguous United States.

In mid-July the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded contracts to Boeing, Masten Space Systems, and Northrop Grumman to develop an unmanned spaceplane to travel hypersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere—as easily as a commercial airliner.

After World War II, the future of commercial air travel was supposed to be fantastic. There were promises that planes like Northrop Grumman's flying wing would become the norm for civilian flying. These promises were often made to Baby Boomers — young, impressionable kids of the 1950s and 60s — like in this cutaway…

While the world is tied up in the mystery of what happened to Malaysian Air Flight 370, testers at Edwards AFB in south central California and at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland are hard at work developing the ultimate tool for solving such a mystery, the Northrop Grumman built MQ-4C Triton.

The 1980s ushered in more than a few aeronautical revolutions thanks to the emergence of both composite manufacturing techniques and rapidly advancing digital technology. This uniquely designed experimental aircraft integrated all of them into a single system.

When most people hear the word "drone," they probably picture a cockpit-free plane zipping over the Iraqi desert. But there's more to it than that. The Army is in the process of adopting a whole new generation of unmanned vehicles that will assist soldiers on the battlefield—and they're by far the scariest…

Defense industry specialists circled up in Washington this week for the three-day-long trade fair of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. In other words, a bunch of guys with a lot of money just got together for a giant drone show. It's actually the world's largest. And here are its wares.

As the role UAVs in the US military expands, the demands placed on these unmanned platforms grow as well. One of the most important new abilities these autonomous fliers must have is the ability to land atop a thin strip of tarmac rolling on the high seas. And that's just what the new Northrop Grumman X-47B will do.

The MQ-8 Fire Scout, an unmanned helicopter used for reconnaissance work by all branches of the US military, made news this week when the Navy grounded its Fire Scout aircraft after a pair of recent crashes. The current machines are unarmed, but by 2013, a planned weapons upgrade will make them first sea-based, armed…

I keep forgetting about how damn huge some drones are. Most people think they are tiny, like toy planes. As this photo of a Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk shows, they are actually big. Big as in pretty damn huge.

An UFO was seen on top of a military truck four days ago travelling down US 77, said residents of Cowley County, Kansas. They thought the military were trying to haul an alien spaceship wrapped in plastic. In plain sight.